Act of Will wh-1

by Andrew James Hartley

  I thought about the maps we had looked over in Adsine, the ones showing the location of the raider attacks. I now knew how they got from place to place unseen, and I had started to wonder if there was a range limit to the power that moved them, or if they could appear only in certain places. Clearly the pale rock in that underground chamber was the source of their power. A smaller version of the same opalescent crystal had been in the center of the Iruni stone circle, and the fact that the raiders had walked there with their coffins suggested that they couldn’t just vanish and reappear anywhere. But when the raiders had massed to assault the village, I had seen no such stone circle where we had appeared, nor had there been anything similar near the road when they attacked the coal wagons.

  That scary raider with the horned helm was also a factor. He had been with them when they assaulted the convoy, and had seemed to move us from the circular cavern to the village, but the raiders at the stone circle had not required his presence to take them to the stables. Unless they could call on him, somehow, from the stone circle. Perhaps he could then bring them to the underground chamber. That made a kind of sense, and would suggest that all the other stones (including the ones in the helms themselves) were receptors: it was the crystalline base of that underground chamber that did the work. Surely, that was it.

  The attacks, as I recalled, were clustered in the central downs, ten or twelve miles south of Verneytha, in the borderlands of Shale and Greycoast. Some had been farther west, around Adsine, and some had been along the shores to the south. Ironwall, which was the easternmost city, had never been attacked, though the roads linking it to Seaholme to the southwest and Hopetown to the northwest had. Could it be that Ironwall was too far from the underground chamber? Or maybe the lack of attacks close to the city was just a way of pointing suspicion elsewhere. The raiders could be nestled snugly under Duke Raymon’s palace for all I knew.

  There was the Razor’s now-ransacked keep, of course, right in the middle of it all. And we hadn’t searched the place for a chamber in the bowels of the castle. But if the raiders could materialize in the keep itself, why appear in the woods outside to attack the place?

  My mood worsened as the slow march progressed. We needed food, supplies, and a clear sense of where we were going. I figured that the rest of the party, after examining the farmhouse by the stone circle and giving up on my returning, would make for Verneytha’s capital city, Harvest, and check in with Treylen, the governor. I should try to meet them there, I decided. I mentioned this to Grath and he passed it along as if everyone was invited. They seemed to think this as good an option as any and trailed after me like I knew what I was doing. It was all fairly bizarre, frankly, though not comically so.

  Part of me wanted to just ride off. Even as poor a horseman as I was, I would reach Harvest in about a third of the time if I hadn’t been dragging this string of starving refugees. But I couldn’t leave them.

  The families stuck together and enfolded the orphaned and lost to their collective bosom. I walked my horse slowly along, not talking to anyone and avoiding their eyes, keeping my distance in every way possible. The woman who had lost her child had found him alive and well just outside the village, but she then had to explain that he would never see his father again. They seemed lost and desperate, infected by terror like it was a disease. Of course I couldn’t leave them.

  By midafternoon we reached a scattered hamlet with a mill and a rustic tavern, and it was like finding an oasis after weeks in the desert. The kids shrieked with delight and danced, jumping into the stream, while the adults hugged each other and cheered and wept. I went inside and bartered with the tavern owner for bread and cheese and a few draughts of ale.

  A few of the villagers stayed at the inn, but most, including Maia’s family and the teenaged kid with the crossbow, who seemed to have aged about ten years since I first met him, stayed with me. We bought a broken-down cart and a couple of horses to pull it, or, rather, I bought it and the others threw in the few coppers they had left. We covered a few more miles, but it was painfully slow, and once it got dark we had to stop and make camp. Again, I kept myself to myself and slept fitfully, getting up several times to make sure there was no sign of the raiders. Everyone was still treating me like some kind of military expert and savior, and though I could play the part well enough, it was exhausting and terrifying. If the raiders caught up with us.

  I couldn’t wait to meet up with the party, if only to hand off the responsibility for these people to someone who would know what to do with it.

  The next day we reached Verneytha. It was all I had heard and more. Golden wheat fields spread to the left, and dairy herds, plump and shiny, grazed on the right. We were stopped by a unit of Verneytha’s light cavalry and asked about our destination. Everyone looked at me, so I did the talking.

  The soldiers were armed with lances and wore light brass-scaled hauberks. Capes of green silk fluttered in the sun behind them. I explained very briefly the history of my sad little entourage, but you could tell that the officer didn’t really care one way or the other. I told him who I was anyway, made it sound like Governor Weasel and I had been in short pants together, and told him we would need a military escort to the city.

  The officer’s attitude changed as soon as I mentioned Edwyn Treylen, becoming more helpful and attentive. I asked what they were doing, riding around like this, wondered even if they had been looking for me. It was standard procedure, they said: fast, mobile policing. It gave the governor eyes all over the state. I asked him what the crime rate was like, and he gave me a blank look, like I’d asked him which part of the moon served the best beer. There was no crime, he said, slightly offended, committed by Verneytha subjects; there were only “malefactors from abroad.” Recently the raiders had taken to hitting patrols like his, he said. Three units had been lost in as many weeks. Now speed was also safety. In fact, if I would saddle up and ride with them, we could get back to Harvest and the rest of the party in no time.

  “What about them?” I asked, nodding at the villagers.

  “They’ve come this far without an armed escort, and through much more dangerous country,” said the officer.

  I stared at him, then said simply, “No. You watch them all the way to the city, or the governor will hear about it.”

  He agreed readily enough, though I don’t think he really got it.

  I took Maia and her parents aside. “I have to go on ahead,” I said. The little girl’s face fell and she clutched my hand, small and tight. “I’ll let the governor know you’re coming,” I said, a little too lightly, avoiding those vast brown eyes. “You’ll be looked after when you get there. You’ll be safe.”

  Would they really? I didn’t know. If the raiders could smash one of Verneytha’s mounted patrols, they could get to the villagers easily enough; I just hoped they saw no reason to bother. As for what Edwyn Treylen would make of these poor and exhausted refugees, I couldn’t say, and preferred not to speculate. But the place looked like it could use still more field laborers, and that couldn’t be too bad a life, could it? I watched the farmhands as they worked by the road, their eyes cast down as if to look at us would be the height of rudeness, and I had an odd sinking feeling. For all its wealth and fertility, Verneytha might not be the paradise I had hoped. The laborers all had something of a haunted look and couldn’t wait to get back to their vegetable picking, staring intently at the ground; it was as if they were afraid, but it was a muted, familiar fear. A legion of raiders in full armor could have ridden right by them and I don’t think they would have seen them, unless they were dressed as asparagus.

  SCENE XLVI Harvest

  Orgos hugged me. It was a bit like being strapped into some kind of torture device, but he grinned broadly and said he was relieved to see me. Even Lisha and Mithos smiled and said they had been worried about me as if I was something they had lost and thought they wouldn’t get back, like, I don’t know, a dog or something. It was strange, but I grinned back. There was
an odd sense of familiarity, if not of actual family. Garnet shook my hand as if we had never met before, and said it was good to see me.

  “You brought all those people?” said Renthrette. “You got them out of a village when the raiders attacked and brought them to Verneytha by yourself?”

  I had a feeling this was going to come up and I had been dreading it. I didn’t know how she had heard the story, but word seemed to have reached the city before I did.

  “Well, yes,” I said, feeling stupid. “I didn’t know what else to do with them, and they had nowhere to go that was even slightly safe, so. ” My voice trailed off. It was a dangerous and moronic thing to have done, and I was sure it would get us into still more trouble with the rat-faced governor. I waited for the verbal onslaught, studying my beer, which-though better than anything we’d had in Shale-didn’t really deserve the attention.

  The more I thought about the whole thing-I thought of it as “the Rescue Scene”-the more theatrical it had seemed. It was like one of those actor’s nightmares when you walk out on stage quite confidently and then realize you don’t know your lines. In fact, you don’t even know what play you are in. Usually in this dream, my attempts to keep the story going onstage are so witless that at some point someone stands up and shouts “You’re not an actor!” Then everything ends in pandemonium, misery, and humiliation. But in the miniplay that was my nightmarish encounter with the raiders, something odd had happened. The audience hadn’t recognized me as some comic buffoon who couldn’t do anything but pratfalls and one-liners, and so they had assumed I could play the hero. Their assumption (well, Maia’s at least) had somehow made it true.

  Renthrette was still watching me. “That was. ” She thought about what exactly it was, everyone else waiting to hear her decision. “Brave,” she ended lamely.

  I studied her quickly, looking for the sarcasm, but it wasn’t there, and neither of us seemed to know what to say next or where to look. It was as if a trout that had been flopping on the riverbank had been picked up carefully by a cat and dropped back into the water.

  I gaped, fishlike. No one spoke for a long time, and then Orgos started making cracks about my selflessness and heroism, everyone laughed, and we got back to our beer and a lighter mood. But, even as Garnet clapped me on the back and said he was ready to try another pint of lager, Renthrette watched me, wary, as if expecting to be somehow caught out and humiliated by whatever I did next. I suppose I watched her the same way. Brave? No. I hadn’t been brave. There had been no decision, no knowing risk of my life, and you couldn’t be brave without knowing it, could you? The house had assumed I knew the role, and so I did. Had Renthrette been in the audience, I might have fallen back on wisecracks and the kind of incompetence that would have gotten them all killed, but that’s life in the theatre for you. If your audience doesn’t believe in you, you can’t believe in yourself.

  I told them the whole story, all about the stone circle, the helms with the crystals set into the bronze, the massive circular chamber with its stable and its horned priest, the attack on the village, and all my musings about where that cavern might be and how it worked. Orgos watched me closely as I spoke of the crystal, and I tried not to look at the pommel of his sword. He smiled as if he were pleased with me. I looked at Garnet as I talked so I wouldn’t have to deal with it. After I had told them everything, we went to see the ratty governor.

  The governor’s palace was a curious construction. It sat in the center of Harvest, a tower made from more glass than I had ever seen. We were led inside by a guard and ascended a spiral staircase up the center of the tower.

  Its outer walls were lined with rooms where scribes wrote, treasurers calculated, and traders met. All were clearly visible as we passed by since the rooms were backlit by the huge windows, but there was almost no sound in the tower and no one responded as we passed their doors. The guard noted our curiosity and grinned. It was an odd grin: a little smug and knowing, but with an edge which resembled that hunted look I had seen in the faces of the field hands.

  “They can’t see you,” he said. “Special glass. We can see in, but they can’t see out.”

  At the top, in a sparse, aggressively functional chamber lined with windows, scribbled Governor Treylen. There was something furtive about his long hands and yellowing nails as they flashed among his papers, and I couldn’t shake the wary distrust I felt when his black, shiny eyes flicked onto mine. He nodded us into chairs and consulted a clock, assessing how much time he could spare us.

  “You are later than I expected,” he said, fixing his beady gaze on Mithos. “I thought we would be getting more regular progress reports for our money, particularly since the attacks seem to have increased in daring. You had better have good tidings.”

  I told him everything, and he listened, clenching and flexing his bony, spider-leg fingers, fixing me with a glassy stare.

  “So the raiders can appear and disappear by magic?” he said as I finished.

  “I’m not sure that it’s magic,” I said, faltering. “I mean, it’s something to do with those rocks and. I can’t think of another word for it, though. Yes, they’re using magic.”

  “I have lost thirty-two wagons since you took this job,” he said, his thin lips pulling back from his long yellow teeth. He was smiling, but it was a smile that held no joy or amusement, unless it was at our expense. I wasn’t sure what I had expected, but disbelieving contempt hadn’t been high on the list.

  “Three villages have been destroyed,” he went on evenly, “their wheat fired, their hands slain, and their ploughs destroyed. In one attack alone I lost two hundred head of cattle, sixty pigs, and a hundred and fifty sheep, roasted alive as they waited for market. A forty-man cavalry unit was wiped out as they gave chase, and a total of fifty-five other Verneytha soldiers have been killed while acting as escorts or patrols. This report of yours with its fanciful tales of stone circles and disappearing raiders does little to restore my confidence in your abilities. If I’d wanted children’s stories-”

  “You wanted to know the truth,” I said, “and I’ve told it to you. If you want to fight the raiders, I suggest you pay more attention to what I’m telling you.”

  Mithos gave me a quick look, but I had no intention of saying any more, so I shut up and waited to crush whatever the governor said next: improvised dialogue, I could do.

  “Ah, Mr. Will Hawthorne,” said the governor in his smuggest, oiliest tone. “Yes. The party’s mouth. The party’s braggart and fool. The last time we met, you had to throw yourself on Raymon’s mercy to avoid a particularly unpleasant and degrading death, earned by your inability to keep your tongue in check. Of course, talk is what you do, isn’t it?” he said, gazing thoughtfully at me. “We thought we had hired soldiers and investigators, but if the rumors are true, you are no more than an actor! A storyteller. No wonder your lies come so fluently. What sewer did you crawl out of, Mr. Hawthorne?”

  “If I’m a sewer rat, I should fit right in here,” I returned. “I might even run for public office.”

  There was a long silence. The governor just sat there and looked at me until I felt embarrassed and flushed.

  “Step this way, Mr. Hawthorne,” he said suddenly. “Come; don’t be afraid, I shall not hurt you. That is not our way here.”

  He had risen from his seat and stepped back a few feet behind the desk. I glanced at the others uncomfortably. There was something cold and collected about his manner that filled me with panic. He crooked a long, pale index finger and oozed, “Come, William, I have something to show you.”

  With a swift movement he kicked open the cover of a circular, well-like hole in the floor.

  “Come,” he repeated, and his voice was disarmingly gentle. “The rest of you stay exactly where you are. There are guards watching you everywhere.”

  I couldn’t see any, but there were windows everywhere, and I didn’t doubt him for a second.

  He stepped into the hole and began to descend a spiral staircas
e, while looking up at me and grinning. His fingers clutched my wrist and pulled me down quickly after him. I recoiled from the strong, fibrous fingers, stumbling down after him until we reached a wooden scaffold from which four evenly positioned staircases descended. Each wound down in a spiral and each was surrounded, all the way down so far as I could see, by softly lit rooms: cells.

  “You see, Mr. Hawthorne,” he whispered, “there are no torture chambers or disemboweling knives here such as you would have experienced in Greycoast. No rack, branding irons, or manacles.”

  He said each word with relish as if imagining them in use. The hair on my neck rose and for a second I thought he was quite mad.

  “But there are no criminals, either,” he said. “All due to potentially continual surveillance. The people never know when they’re being watched, so they have to behave as if they always are. And not only our prisons have glass walls. Offices. Schools. Markets. Brothels. Everyone monitored. All monitors monitored in turn. Field laborers paid to watch each other. It’s a self-policing society, Mr. Hawthorne. A perfect economy made secure by a myriad interconnected eyes and ears. A society where the police are in here”-he smiled, tapping his temple-“so it becomes impossible to even think criminally. You are never alone in Verneytha. Never.

  “So you see, Mr. Hawthorne, how careful you have to be when you enter a new land. Perhaps you hated Greycoast’s dungeons, but believe me, for a free man like yourself, there is nothing more terrible than continual surveillance. Nothing. In time you would yearn for the rack and the gallows, Mr. Hawthorne. You would plead for a torturer to let you pay your penalty and cover those awful, lidless eyes that watch you day and night. A few months in my cells, and you would never know what it was to be alone again. Even when no one was there you would feel them, watching, listening. Controlled madness, Mr. Hawthorne. Regulated insanity for the good of the state. Go and tell your stories about that, and leave the magic for the children and the very, very stupid.”